Painting of Cave Environment

Final colored painting of the Cave environment.

More Memory Shards!

Previously, we only had a Beach environment. This time, we are adding two more environments, and with it comes more prop concepts! Brice is handling most of the prop concept art this time and I'm working on the story script as well as painting textures.

Our two new environments are the Cave, a gold mine populated by monsters, and the Tutorial, which has a black and white minimalist look, as if the environment is still loading, with a glowing terrain.

For the Tutorial, I imagine the memory shard will be animated as if it's also in the process of loading.

For the Cave, I think of a memory shard that resembles both a lantern and the mushrooms that populate the cave.

Work-In-Progress Painting: Cave Environment Concept Art

This is an underpainting for concept art for our next environment, the cave. The monster and props here are designed by fellow concept artist Brice. (Except the memory shard, which I am still working on.) My goal for this painting is to figure out color scheme. This week has been a lot of tweaking colors to get the colors to work harmoniously.

I'm very satisfied with this color scheme so far, so I will start painting soon! I know it looks like a sketch right now, but it won't stay that way. In the end, this will be in the same style as the title screen painting.

Update

Hello, everybody, I have a quick Dissonance update! It feels like we're really close to achieving exactly the type of game we've been imagining in our heads! Thanks to our programmers, we're able to add a lot of gameplay elements we dropped previously because of limitations. Now we are ironing out bugs, working on music, starting the marketing research. Everyone's working hard and doing great!

Me? There's a little break for texture painting while we concept some new levels. In the mean time, I'm writing plot and dialogue. This weekend, I presented a basic plot outline and some ideas for character traits for Shim and Lumi. My team liked it!

In the current iteration of the story, Shim is stuck in his own mind. Neither Shim nor Lumi know what's going on, and the story revolves around Shim trying to figure out what his place is in this strange world. Lumi, on the other hand, is preoccupied with getting out.

To keep the game flowing smoothly, the dialogue will occur at the beginning of each level, and perhaps at the memory shards. The exact method of delivery is still in the works. Our programmers are working on getting some dialogue boxes up an running.

More story updates to come!

Painting Tutorial

Here is the start screen painting for Dissonance! The positioning of the title and buttons is not yet finalized.

If you're wondering about my painting process, there is a tutorial under the cut.

Work In Progress

Sneak peak at my work this week! It's still in the process of being painted. This is part of a bigger painting that will eventually become the start menu.

Chapter 2 Concept Art

Various trees: Full tree turn-around, various submerged stumps and tree branches

Bones, sand dunes, and an angler fish lure.

My job has been, so far this winter, to concept common props and to texture them. Now that I have a little break, I'm working on something a bit different for the next update. Until then!

Texture Progress 2

Variety of palm trees

A message in a bottle, a mini lighthouse, and Lumi

Two types of waves

Texture Progress

I've been painting the textures of common props. Shown here are rocks, logs, planks, and grasses.

The Sky, Part 1

A small update today. The cloud concept art comes with a tutorial on designing and coloring new clouds, as reference for myself or for anybody else who textures our clouds.

Winter 2014 Progress

Dissonance has received a gameplay overhaul at the beginning of the quarter, but that's not stopping the art team! Here's some of the concept art I created for assets in Level 1, Chapter 1. The art is sketched in pencil, inked with a felt tip marker and brush pen, and colored in photoshop.

Boulders, shells, and message in a bottle designs

Memory shard design

Tree designs

Various designs. Of note: the finalized memory shard design for Level 1.

Sidekick Concept Art

Lumi Turnaround

This is our sidekick, Lumi. I chose for her the form of a paper lantern because it fit perfectly with the art style. At the early stages of design, she was an important secondary main character who had abilities to affect the environment. However, we decided to cut a lot of complex gameplay ideas because we don't have a dedicated programmer. Instead, we will play to our team's strength in art. Lumi is currently most important to narrative.

Choosing what exactly Lumi is has been a long process. We had ideas for her as a robot, a fire spirit, an animal, and a lantern. It was only after we established the papercraft style in early October that we could narrow it down to something that fits with the environment. When I chose this look we also had the idea that other similar characters would be scattered around the background and revived to increase the light level. That idea was also scrapped more recently in favor of collectibles.

Initial design sketches in pencil for Lumi as a paper lantern

From this narrowed down early design sheet, I had the team choose favorites and critique the looks, similar to the early monster concept art sheet. However, while the favorite monsters were chosen unanimously, Lumi's design was subject to more critique and took more time to research and design overall. The geometric style fit best with the art style. I mixed this with the ribbons in the final design to give Lumi some character. I imagine in Lumi's idle animation that she would float gently in place, and when she moves her ribbons trail behind her.

Updated Height Chart

An updated height chart

This is the height chart I created for the second pitch, using warmer colors and the updated main character design. Tian C. is working on getting the overall color scheme working with the new direction of our game. (In a nutshell, we are doing less horror and more dream-like overall mood.)

You'll notice I left off the giant spider from this image. That character is back in the concept art stage. He needs a proper turnaround in the papercraft style so we can model him. I'm not certain if we are still incorporating a boss battle at all, most likely we'll discuss this over winter break.

Pitches and Playtesting

Today, Jeff C. and I attended an event to pitch Dissonance to an animation class, with the goal of finding animators for the game. Several other related events took place around the same time, including an event to playtest games and Coffee Hour, a weekly get-together for students who work in the computer labs. We remained until all events ended, showing off our game to several people, including game designers, writers, professors, and animators.

Our team leads were unable to attend today, so Jeff and I handled the pitch. Jeff is our sound effect lead and also works on level design. I'm a concept and texture artist. Together, we were able to talk about the direction of our game and present our work so far. As people came our way to ask about our game, it was Jeff who guided players through the game example and me who presented a condensed version of our pitch to anybody who missed it.

It's incredibly wonderful to see the entire team's work together in one location and to get so much positive feedback from others. We still have a ways to go with our literal game, but the concepts are evolved to a point where I can imagine how our game will play in the end.

This was a great experience! I made a lot of notes about presenting our game to others. For one, our current game pitch is a little lengthy. I will definitely be creating another (more condensed) pitch for future use. I like the idea of getting a dedicated writer on our team, so I will be preparing a second pitch especially for that purpose. There's a little work to be done in the meantime, though. With one week of the quarter left, we'll be wrapping up with a blockout of our first level. I expect to continue working on this project through the winter break.

Texturing Begins

Here's a sneak peak at the texture I'm currently painting!

3D model work by Olsen D.C. and Tian Chen.

Monster Concept Art

Flying Monster, closed mouth

Flying Monster, open mouth

Walking Monster

These are turnarounds for the monsters scattered around the level. We have two types of monsters, a flying monster and a walking monster. I made the monsters a warmer color scheme to fit the new environment color palette.

It's especially necessary to have a turnaround for the walking monster due to his odd shape. On the back side, there are scars in place of his eyes. I was inspired by the tearing of paper left from pulling off a sticker. The center of the scar is pink so it looks like flesh, while the outer part is white to blend back into the shell and to look like paper.

Character Designs Process

Above: Colored character designs on a height chart.

This week I worked on revising the monsters to fit our style better. Colors are chosen based on a mostly purple background. Next I will also try green and brown, based on Tian C.'s concept art, to make sure the green monsters stand out from the foliage.

The colors for Lumi (the paper lantern character) are still a work in progress. As a very friendly character and a source of light, she should stand out with vivid, cheerful colors.

On the far left is the main character. His design is done by Brice P. I decided his color should be close to white so he stands out against the dark background in dim lighting. Instead of stark white, I chose a light bluish grey to keep him from standing out too much in a background that's void of pastel colors.

Monster Designs

Above: Monster Design Ideas

We decided to use a paper craft style for the textures. Because of this, I drew monsters with geometric shapes, folds, flat planes, or shapes otherwise reminiscent of paper.

Since our level theme is anxiety, I chose to use sharp edges, triangles, and twisted forms as the basic shapes for each monster. The style of each eye reflects this. Many monsters have triangle pupils. One monster has eyes based on spiders, and the two monsters on the bottom left have empty eyes. I wanted to make the monsters look unnatural.

My inspiration for the monsters came from some sketches team member Brice P. did for the main characters, which were based on crumpled paper and shards of glass. Alex G., who came up with the original concept, had in mind some sort of Eldritch Abomination.

Above: Monster Design Ideas, Not Colored

We were able to decide on two monster ideas. The monster shaped like a parallelogram is our ground monster, and the very last monster, a flying pyramid that opens up to reveal teeth and a void, is our flying monster.

The other two monsters on the bottom row, the twisted form and the eel, also had many votes, but the team decided they would not fit this particular level design as well. I hope we will be able to use them for another level in the future.

An Introduction

Hello! My name is Nicole Strang, and I am on my last year of college. I am currently taking a set of three classes known as Senior Studio, which span over one year. In this set of classes, the students split into teams to create a video game. All of the students have already taken classes related to game art and design and are about to graduate, and so are focusing on developing content for their personal portfolios.

I am currently a concept artist, texture artist, and a narrative designer for one of these games, a puzzle/platformer with the working title "Dissonance".

I will be sharing art, meeting notes, and design process in the future. Stay tuned!